“I think Che had perseverance and morality. Being the underdog and fighting against injustice and standing up for the forgotten moved him so hard. Kind of like Jesus, in a way…”
“I think anyone who buys a T-shirt of Che has gotta be cool. If I see someone with a Che T-shirt, I think, ‘He’s got good taste.’”
-Benicio Del Toro

“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail … This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”
“If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba), we would have fired them against the heart of the US, including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”
-Che “Kind of like Jesus…” Guevara

The irony is thick, as it always is. His face is on suburban t-shirts all around the country, and Hollywood is making a hero out of Che Guevara, aka the butcher of La Cabaña, the man who killed journalists, businessmen and merchants, presided over mass executions, prison labor camps, and caused economic ruin to millions.[Read more →]

I was reading one of my favorite blogs, David Friedman’s Ideas, and he had an interesting topic: Ways to promote your political ideology. Let’s say you’re a moderately wealthy and talented individual with a strong desire to promote a certain political viewpoint. How do you go about doing it? What’s the most effective, efficient way to get it done? You want the most amount of change for the least amount of money and effort. I want to hear your ideas.

Almost every year we hear about scenes of consumer chaos and lunatic stampedes as shoppers knock each other down while trying to snatch up quality deals on Black Friday. This year an unfortunate man in New York was trampled to death in a Wal-Mart by a bastard herd of sub-humans who didn’t even look back at his body after they crushed him to death with their very nice shoes.

They have to be sub-humans, right? That’s the only way we can rationalize something like this. This has to be a one-of-a-kind incident where a group of sociopaths were all at the same place at the same time. Real, well-adjusted people would have stopped and helped that man. You would have taken charge of that situation and helped that poor man up and scolded the people who didn’t. Everyone thinks that. But no one ever does that.[Read more →]

Researchers at Leeds University, led by Prof Jens Krause, performed a series of experiments where volunteers were told to randomly walk around a large hall without talking to each other. A select few were then given more detailed instructions on where to walk. The scientists discovered that people end up blindly following one or two people who appear to know where they’re going.

The published results showed that it only takes 5% of what the scientists called “informed individuals” to influence the direction of a crowd of around 200 people. The remaining 95% follow without even realizing it.[Read more →]